You can expect this post to be updated quite regularly as I am really excited to see where this goes. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ll endeavour to keep this post updated as much as possible as new features and changes come up for both companies. I think the internet marketing space will be changing a fair bit in the coming 12-24 months as more people start new online platforms like these to compete for a slice of the pie. *(Also a note, that I am using affiliate links within this post, so if you do want to go purchase either of these two powerhouses, clicking a link will pass me off a little commission!)*
This means that you can recognize a LeadPage (Landing Page) from a mile away and when people (the normal non-internet marketers) start noticing the similarity between all these page designs it’ll be more obvious that people are trying to squeeze a lead out of them. Having said that, I’m confident the crew at LeadPages will be smart enough to adapt and start churning out more high-quality pages more often to give their users more variety.

“Moving on, the lack of proof. There is only 1 split-test. The rest is where they’ve been featured in, a way too quick explanation of their experience, and 2 testimonials. Long story short, they need more significant results-related proof, which includes split-tests/case studies, but also how “real” number of people saving time, being more productive…etc.

To better understand the concept of a sales funnel and just how you can implement it in your own business, let's look at the following image from Shutterstock. On the left side of the image, you see a magnet. That magnet is attracting customers, which happens a number of ways. From blogging to social media to paid ads and everything in between, how the visitors arrive to your website has some impact on the success of your funnel.
Cons: I'm on the Etison Suite because I like the simplicity of using Actionetics as my email client. Yes, it is an expensive cost each month but the platform and process was created by one of the best marketers and online salespersons out there. It's ably supported by a great community of entrepreneurs all using (or trying to use) the software to get their business to the next level.
The final stage is closing the opportunity in your pipeline. Your prospect either turns into a customer or simply leaves the pipeline as a lost opportunity. If the deal is won, you move the deal to the won stage in the pipeline and begin onboarding your new customer. Some deals may slip through the cracks for reasons that are beyond the control of your sales techniques, like budget constraints. It is important to keep a record of your lost deals too so you can track the reasons why you lost them, and nurture those prospects in the future to win back their business and relationship.
This is also kind of a starting block, if you will, for my ClickFunnels affiliate sales. I do reviews, I also offer bonuses, which I'll go ahead and show you here real quick. I have several preexisting pre-built funnels, a perfect webinar funnel, if you're selling real stuff, like in an eCommerce platform, if you're trying to do a product launch. A couple of my clients currently, that I'm building funnels for, is in the middle a product launch. If you're in an MLM or a network marketing situation, I've got a funnel for you. I've got a fishbowl funnel. I've got best selling book funnels for authors, and, as you can see, a ton more. If you tell me what you're into, once you can sign up using my ClickFunnels affiliate link, I'll be happy to give you maybe an even more relevant funnel to your particular niche or vertical that you're in.
To use with social media advertising. If you’re using Facebook ads, then one of the best things you can do is send viewers to a landing page, rather than to a blog post, or worst of all, a straight up sales page. Sending them to a landing page means that they only have ONE choice: to subscribe or leave. There are no other distractions to keep them from opting in, so if they like your offer, they’ll subscribe. If you are selling something, then you can then put them in an email sequence to pitch your product to them. See how that works?
The header must be fully descriptive of what you're selling. Because, if the visitor doesn't understand exactly what you do immediately upon landing, they'll either bounce out of laziness or skim-read the rest of the page until they get the gist. Once they get that gist, they'll likely bounce anyway because they're still too lazy to re-read the page from the beginning.
Of course, some of you are makers and originators and you really want to build your own thing and that's totally fine. I would just say, make sure you adhere to direct response principles and philosophies when it comes to creating your funnels, that is something that's super easy, but the best way, as Russell Bronson of ClickFunnels, he's the founder of ClickFunnels and DotComSecrets. He's a big proponent of what we call funnel hacking. Funnel hacking is something also that I've written about on my blog. As a matter of fact, I'm hoping this link works. Yeah. GroovyMarketing.biz/funnelhacking. I've created a funnel hacking playbook.
Cons: My dislikes are more nit picky than complaints; setup of URLs can involve 2 separate screens, which makes it a little confusing at first. It is template driven and some of these are very Internet Marketing centric, so the look and style may not be a fit, but of course you can adapt and make these your own. A broader selection of templates will help, but they do have a community of developers adding to it daily, so this is likely a short term problem.
The reason I call this the ideal scenario is because it assumes that you found Spotify from your Google search for "streaming music." In reality, Spotify worked to attract you to their service through YouTube ads, social media advertising, and other marketing channels. After all these efforts, the Google search was just the last piece that pushed you over the edge.
The messaging on the page reinforces the reason for their click, reducing or removing confusion and therefore increasing conversion rates. This improves overall user experience and reduces the bounce rate (individuals leaving the site without converting or navigating to another portion of the site) for the page. Good message matching can increase conversion by up to 50% in many cases.[13]

Overall: Easy setup and management of funnels, with options to integrate your entire site in there if you want to. Cool tools that allow you to manage the flow without typing in URLs, as it goes to the next step in the funnel. Decent reporting and analytics built in, and obviously integrates with analytics tools as well. The biggest benefit here is speed to execute, as everything is laid out for you, with sample funnels as well, to give you an initial idea of flow. You could seriously run an entire business on here, and it's good for selling as well as lead generation.

As you can see, the pros definitely outweigh the cons. Some of the cons are pretty nitpicky, including the URLs being messy, but that’s more of a personal preference than anything. I know there are lots of other landing page builders that people will use, including Thrive Architect by Thrive Themes. For me, I’ve found the funnel step integration to be some of the easiest funnel software to design though.

By now, your customers trust you (as they should!). They’ve received all the benefits from the top of the funnel (the freebie they registered for on your website), and the middle of the funnel (be it emails with great content from you or otherwise), and they have some sense of who you are as a person. This is where you ask for the sale (hello, bottom of your funnel!). You want to continue to engage, of course, but you also want to offer something of even more value to your customers.

If people want to convert many of their leads into sales, then they would often pay high prices in search of a well-functioning funnel which effectively converts customers and makes sales. However, you don’t necessarily have to use expensive tools in order to get those conversions anymore. When you use a simple system, such as ClickFunnels, you get to save expenses on staff such as developers and designers, as well as save money on expenses such as email automation software and landing page software. ClickFunnels is an all-encompassing piece of software which allows this entire process to be simplified and streamlined for you.

Cons: There seems to be a lot of issues with their back end server infrastructure and cache updates. Elements and page orders, etc. do not always update as you expect them to, as well as their server systems have proven to be only about 90% reliable. Not a problem at low traffic volumes, but a huge issue for anyone driving thousands of users per hour to their sites. Support is also not that knowledgable or helpful, though they try their best.

Leadpages provides HTML5 templates for contact pages, webinar pages, sales lead and other types of landing pages that customers use to improve leads and get better conversions. The service runs on Google App Engine and uses technology such as Big Table to analyze the landing page data. Unlike competitors that use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), Leadpages does not have to translate into HTML. Instead the HTML pages are already made, which allows for the data to be decoupled and analyzed in the Google cloud stack. The pages are optimized for any mobile device.
The Funnel Hacks System is a training program which gives you 6-month access to the full ClickFunnels marketing suite, allowing you to harness the power of modern marketing to its fullest. The Funnel Hacks system gives you access to a bundle of tools, including the ClickFunnels platform in its entirety, as well as Actionetics and Backpack, two very powerful tools. The unique thing about Funnel Hacks, however, is that it comes with guides and training sessions which teach you how to use funnels effectively and how to take advantage of ClickFunnels’ innate power.
Adopting a CRM positively impacts sales teams’ performance. But, what most users miss to realize is that CRM software is not just a customer database; it’s also the most beneficial tool for managing the sales funnel and pipeline. CRM helps you define your sales process, identify leaks in the sales funnel, and streamline the conversion process to bring leads down to the bottom of the funnel.
“1. Use a sticky navigation bar: A ‘sticky’ navigation bar can help people explore ‘Edgar’ in a comfortable and controlled manner. People like to explore websites without them feeling that they are losing control. Even if they never use the navigation bar, it can still have a positive impact on the overall experience. Not having control can potentially trigger a feeling of stress which can cause people to leave the site and therefore increase bounce rates. (Think of the analogy of a GPS in your car)
Look gorgeous and act classy. Looks may not be everything, but they do count for something in landing page design. Why is it that an attractive man can hit it off with a woman using the same line that might dub a less aesthetically pleasing guy a “creeper?” The truth is that, despite what we teach children, appearance alters perception. Your landing page should not come off creepy, it should come off super classy. If the visitor is a chick in a bar, you want to wow her and take her home…. for a riveting game of Scrabble!
Webflow, a design tool for web developers, packs a lot of information into just a GIF and three form fields. Having the entire sign-up form on a single line is a nice touch here -- not only does it make the page shorter, but filling out each box from left to right shows users how close they are to clicking the fourth blue button and getting started for free.
Remove unnecessary words — Every word existing on your page must be necessary. If you can remove a word without it reducing how enticing, clear, or useful a sentence is, remove it. (Excess verbiage increases the visitor's labor, which triggers their impulse to skim.) A tip: avoid clichés like revolutionary, incredibly powerful, best-ever, and so on. Other products claim these qualities, so visitors are blind to them. It's better to specifically describe how you're different.

The 6 Weeks Funnel Hacks Master Class is a 6-week course which gives you a broad overview of everything to do with sales funnels, including things such as building funnels, webinar funnels, membership funnels, product launch funnels, and opt-in funnels. This effectively teaches you how to use ClickFunnels in order to create niche and powerful funnels.

Unique visitors instead of total visits — If you're counting every visit in the denominator of the equation, you're including return visits too. This doesn't make sense if someone can only convert once (e.g. signup for an account). Consider how they might check out the site a few times before converting. If so, don't let that deflate your conversion metric. Instead, count the unique number of visitors in any given period. And make your period at least as long as the average time it takes for someone to convert after first visiting your site.Disclaimer: We spend hours researching and writing our articles and strive to provide accurate, up-to-date content. However, our research is meant to aid your own, and we are not acting as licensed professionals. We recommend that you consult with your own lawyer, accountant, or other licensed professional for relevant business decisions. Click here to see our full disclaimer.
In the previous section, I listed the 5 steps of nurturing your prospects. The ultimate goal of that process is to create Lifetime Customers. As you can imagine, those lifetime customers will be major contributors to the long-term growth of your business. This is where a lot of businesses fail. It’s a lot easier to sell lots of your best products and/or services to a small group of raving fans than it is to sell just one item to masses of new customers.
The messaging on the page reinforces the reason for their click, reducing or removing confusion and therefore increasing conversion rates. This improves overall user experience and reduces the bounce rate (individuals leaving the site without converting or navigating to another portion of the site) for the page. Good message matching can increase conversion by up to 50% in many cases.[13]

Your sales funnel is healthy if you have enough prospects going through it. If you’re moving enough prospects through the funnel with the experiences and interactions you create and if you are able to profitably convert enough prospects into paying customers, your sales funnel is healthy. See our article on Sales Metrics – 17 Reports That Improve Your Sales Pipeline Performance to help measure your sales funnel health.

Actionetics is ClickFunnels’ email automation software, designed to be used in conjunction with ClickFunnels. When it comes to Actionetics, you are spoiled for choice when it comes to functions. For example, you can use Actionetics to create an autoresponder, to create email lists, to make email sequences, to segment/organize contacts with tags, and to construct action funnels following certain internal/external triggers.

I wanted to also show you, which by the way, you can delete or archive funnels that you don't want. So, I'm archiving this test funnel immediately. This should take me back to the main page. It does. One of the cool things about ClickFunnels is that you can share funnel. So, quite literally, let's say you want my event application opt-in funnel. I can go to settings and I can grab what we call the share funnel link, which is right here, and I can send that to you and you can import it directly into your account, and it's super easy. Quite literally, click on it and boom, it lets you into your account. And you get all these cool prebuilt features, cuts down on time a whole lot and allows you to concentrate on optimizing instead of always building.

Cons: Despite the promised functionality, Backpack and Actionetics are highly limited. In 2-3 years, the functionality may be unparalleled, but at the moment the little bugs make it an extremely frustrating process. I can't find a good reason to pay the additional money when there are alternatives like Mailchimp for a far better CRM and other decent affiliate solutions out there.

Wonder which option is best if I currently have only one product selling on Amazon (only, no e-comm on my own site)? I can see how Clickfunnels may be superior for up-selling, and “subscription” type sales, but if my product is one that perhaps my customer would by a few of for their own use and/or gifts, it strikes me that many of the advanced functions of Clickfunnels would be “wasted” on my current model. Appreciate any feedback on this.

There are two options: pro pricing and free signup. Signing up is as simple as possible. You just need to create a username and password. Once you get in and start using their tools, you’ll have to upgrade. The free account limits the number of forms you can use. When you hit that limit, you’re requested to upgrade. Otherwise your account won’t work.